How far away is the Sun from Earth ?

The Sun is at an average distance of about 93,000,000 miles (150 million kilometers) away from Earth. It is so far away that light from the Sun, traveling at a speed of 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) per second, takes about 8 minutes to reach us. Like all of the other planets in our Solar System, Earth does not travel around the Sun in a perfect circle. Instead, its orbit is elliptical, like a stretched circle, with the Sun just off the center of the orbit. This means that the distance between Earth and the Sun changes during a year. At its closest, the Sun is 91.4 million miles (147.1 million km) away from us. At its farthest, the Sun is 94.5 million miles (152.1 million km) away. The Earth is closest to the Sun during winter in the northern hemisphere.

 

More information about- The SUN

 

The sun is the largest and the most massive object in the solar system, but it is just a medium-sized star among the hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

Radius, diameter & circumference of SUN

The sun is nearly a perfect sphere. Its equatorial diameter and its polar diameter differ by only 6.2 miles (10 km). The mean radius of the sun is 432,450 miles (696,000 kilometers), which makes its diameter about 864,938 miles (1.392 million km). You could line up 109 piles of earth across the face of the sun. The sun's circumference is about 2,713,406 miles (4,366,813 km).

Mass and volume

The total volume of the sun is 1.4 x 1027cubic meters. About 1.3 million Earths could fit inside the sun. The mass of the sun is 1.989 x 1030 kilograms, about 333,000 times the mass of the Earth. The sun contains 99.8 percent of the mass of the entire solar system.

But the sun's weight isn't constant. Over time, the solar wind has carried particles, and thus mass, away from the star. According to ”Bad Astronomer” Phil Plait, the sun loses an average 1.5 million tons of material every second to the solar wind.

Meanwhile, in the heart of the star, mass is converted into energy. The powerhouse of the star converts more than 4 million tons of solar material into energy every second, Plait said.

Altogether, Plait estimated that the sun has lost a total of 1024tons of material over its 4.5-billion-year lifetime, or more than 100 times the mass of the Earth. While that sounds like a lot, it's only about 0.05 percent of the star's total mass. 

The Stars

It may be the biggest thing in this neighborhood, but the sun is just average compared to other stars. Betelgeuse, a red giant, is about 700 times bigger than the sun and about 14,000 times brighter.

"We have found stars that are 100 times bigger in diameter than our sun. Truly those stars are enormous," NASA says on its SpacePlace website. "We have also seen stars that are just a tenth the size of our sun."

According to NASA's solar scientist C. Alex Young, if the sun were hollow, it would take about one million piles of earth to fill it.